Clare Hawkes – Artist’s Statement
My paintings flit between figurative and abstract. I am particularly concerned with colour and gestural mark making using these to create mood, feeling and energy.
I am interested in the overlooked and forgotten elements in life, art, and society, and often use abstraction as a metaphor for these invisibilities.
As well as drawing inspiration from contemporary issues, I give a contemporary twist to historical and other cultural references, reinterpreting them in a 21st Century context.
How paint can create marks, layers and textures that combine its unpredictability with physical manipulation underpins my treatment of both the human figure, the landscape and relationships between them.
Clare Hawkes – Artist Biography
Clare is a contemporary expressionist painter, working primarily in oils, and depending heavily on use of colour and gesture.
Originally from Cheshire, Clare now has a studio near her home in West Dorset where she makes and sells her work.
A graduate of the Arts University Bournemouth (BA Fine Art - First Class Honours) Clare is a member of the Salon Group, part of Dorset Visual Arts, with whom she is engaged in ongoing research and exhibition projects.
Key inspirational influences on her practice include the modernist and expressionist legacy: Mitchell, Frankenthaler, Cezanne, Soutine, DeKooning, Diebenkorn and the Bay Area movement.
Subject matter can come from art history and classical works - how these can be revisited in the light of changing values about the world of artists themselves, as well as their subjects, or, from other cultural references such as mythology, literature, cinema and music.
She has exhibited in Cheshire, Manchester, Bournemouth, London, Poole, Lyme Regis and has sold original works and prints to UK and worldwide clients.
